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Category: life extension – Page 705

Aubrey de Grey: Can We and Should We Give Ourselves Indefinite Youth? Oh Yes

The marginalization of anti-aging research is our most shameful humanitarian failure.

Aging is a hot topic among the chattering classes these days. What with biotech companies like Calico and Human Longevity Inc. being founded with the mission to defeat aging, and venerable institutions such as Prudential proclaiming the imminence of superlongevity on billboards, there’s no denying that this is a time of great interest in our oldest and deepest-held dream — to escape from the tyranny of inexorable and ultimately fatal physiological decline.

But hang on — is the buzz around aging really reflective of what’s being done to realize this goal? The briefest dispassionate analysis reveals a different story altogether. The proportion of government spending allocated in the industrialized world to diseases and disabilities of old age is appropriately high, but it is overwhelmingly dedicated to the transparently quixotic approach of attacking those ailments directly — as if they were infections — rather than attacking their lifelong accumulating causes.

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Survival of the richest: how London’s super-rich are trying to buy immortality

You’ve got the Lamborghini and the Learjet, the houses and quite possibly the palaces; Erdem designs your dresses and you’ve got heaps of diamonds. What next? Well, adornment can only take you so far: what good is that Lech heli-skiing pad when your knees are shot? What’s the point in building a multibillion-pound business when you’re unwittingly courting a heart attack? As technology evolves ever more rapidly, ultra high net worth individuals are turning their attention inward, investigating how to stall the ageing process, and spending serious money to load their dice against death.

Across the road from Harrods sits Omniya clinic, a calm, contemporary white space amid the hustle of Knightsbridge. At street level it is a luxuriously reimagined pharmacy, whose curated selection includes recent launches from Hollywood’s favourite ‘cosmeceutical’ brands Zo Skin Health and Dr Levy. ‘I wanted to create a place that brings the newest advancements in medical and regenerative health to London,’ says co-founder Danyal Kader, a former lawyer, radiant with bien-être. He was so depressed by the difficulty of finding the best medical treatment for his father, who suffers from a heart condition, that he decided to create his own one-stop conduit to wellness. ‘We optimise the lives our clients can lead, body, mind and soul.’ To this end, he has brought together a team of leading specialists who analyse the health of their clients in the most minute and sophisticated detail — a kind of space-age human MOT.

One of these is cellular ageing specialist Dr Mark Bonar. As his title suggests, Bonar is passionate about the very specific degradations that happen in the cells of the body as we age — and still more excited about the new ways he can use to slow such deterioration. Consider, for example, telomeres. ‘Telomeres are the caps on the ends of our DNA,’ Bonar explains. ‘A bit like the plastic on the end of a shoe lace, they prevent the ends from fraying. By measuring their length in the lab we can determine how well the body is ageing’ — for instance, if at 30, you show the wear and tear you’d expect in a 40-year-old. ‘The length can also inform you about your risk of various kinds of disease such as breast or bowel cancer.’

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Presidential Candidate Suggests We Microchip Syrian Refugees

A new article on my campaign with a provocative headline, but most of the story is nice. I’ll be speaking in Florida on Saturday as part of the Immortality Bus tour. We visited Alabama’s largest megachurch yesterday:

His name sounds funny to Americans, but presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan says it’s totally normal in Hungary, from where his parents hail. Istvan himself was born in Los Angeles and worked for National Geographic for years — a job that led him to explore science, particularly the concept of transhumanism, which posits that people will merge with technology.

Today, Istvan continues to write for Vice, Psychology Today, Gizmod o, and more — when he’s not campaigning across the country and promoting the Transhumanist Party platform, which promises better lives — and hopefully immortality — through science. Istvan will speak this Saturday at the Church of Perpetual Life in Hollywood, which promotes the same ideals and which New Times featured in a cover story earlier this year.

Istvan says that as a journalist, he used to cover nature, until “we were in Vietnam and I had a very close call with a land mine. I thought, ‘Why don’t I write less about nature and the environment and more about science, medicine, and future uses of science to conquer death?’” After leaving Nat Geo circa 2004, when he was about 28, to take care of his ailing father, he says he made some money in real estate and in 2013, “I wrote a novel called The Transhumanist Wage r, which launched my career as a futurist.”

Now he’s onboard with the Transhumanist Party, which has been established for about 14 months, he says. “It’s an actual, organized national party,” he says, though you’re unlikely to see it on a ballot because it’s nearly impossible for small political parties to get on “unless you have almost 50 or 60 million dollars lying around.”

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Experimental Dementia Drug May Have Anti-Aging Effects

Researchers at the Salk Institute working on an experimental Alzheimer’s drug have discovered it may have a host of anti-aging effects too.

Building on previous work

Research had already been conducted on the drug candidate, J147, with the aim of targeting Alzheimer’s. The results showed the drug could help prevent and even regenerate; reversing memory loss and a form of inherited Alzheimer’s disease in mice subjects. While this form comprises only 1% of Alzheimer’s cases, the biggest risk factor for the remainder is old age. If you could target brain aging itself, risk factors would be significantly reduced.

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Resetting The Clock: New Enzyme Found To Repair Telomeres

Resetting Your Biological Clock: New Enzyme Found To Repair Telomeres.

The telomere caps on the end of your chromosomes unravel bit by bit with every cell division, and if they’re not repaired division eventually stops altogether. Cells like stem cells express special enzymes to lengthen these caps, and we’ve now found another one that does the job.

A key player in aging?

Many factors drive aging, but telomeres play a key role in allowing cells to divide at all and are therefore a major potential anti-aging target. Aging is a murder mystery case involving a range of perpetrators, but telomere shortening has been connected to multiple age-related diseases and many scientists believe we’ll have to find ways to repair telomeres if we want to live longer.

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Uncovering the secret of turning back time

I had read about Singapore in genetic engineering way back in the 90’s. I think they were 1st or 2nd in making immortal skin cells at the time.

Singapore scientists have unravelled a mystery that could pave the way for turning back the clock on ageing.

A recent study led by Dr Ng Shyh Chang of the Genome Institute of Singapore at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) has found a gene in human egg cells that suppresses an enzyme causing cells to age.

This is the Tcl1 gene, and by increasing the protein it produces, the researchers found they could suppress the enzyme that causes mitochondria — the cells’ batteries — to age over time.

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Legalization of Drugs Should Be Part of a Transhumanist Agenda

New article for Vice Motherboard on why society should support legalization of all drugs–and a short video of the Immortality Bus in Arkansas talking to marijuana supporters (a state where it’s totally illegal):

The “Mount Rushmore of the Drug War” featuring founding prohibitionists Harry Anslinger, Billie Holiday, and Arnold Rothstein. Image: Donkey Hotey/Flickr

I’m from San Francisco. Doing drugs—especially smoking pot—seems second nature to me. I’ve made a point of trying nearly all drugs, and I’m unabashedly proud of that fact. I consider Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception one of the most important books I read in my youth, and I’ve often wondered if it should be mandatory that everyone try a hallucinogenic drug at least once in their lives.

Almost all transhumanists welcome and endorse mind-altering substances. We thrive off change, experimentation, and new experiences, including wild drug trips with friends. For transhumanists, trying drugs is not just about having fun, but about self-amelioration and becoming the best, most enlightened versions of ourselves.

I’m driving a bus across the country to deliver a Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the US Capitol. One of those rights will certainly include language that advocates for citizens being able to take any drugs they want, so long as the taking of it doesn’t directly hurt someone else.

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Your Gut May Be Home to an Entirely New Form of Life

Might be a good start point for some new longevity research.

A new genetic analysis of human gut bacteria is turning up some really weird critters—so weird, in fact, that some biologists are speculating we’ve found an entirely new domain of life. We should take that possibility with a healthy dose of skepticism. But here’s why it’s even being discussed.

In the past ten years, new genomic technologies have, for the first time, enabled scientists to explore our microbiome—that trove of invisible critters that live on us and in us. Microbiome research is quite literally rewriting the textbooks on human biology, as we learn that everything from our mouths to our intestines to our skin is, in fact a complex and diverse ecosystem. Hell, we’re even surrounded in a personal cloud of bacteria. By some estimates, the human cells in your body are vastly outnumbered by microbes.

Now that we’ve come to appreciate just how ubiquitous our microbial tenants are, we’re starting to drill deeper and learn their identities. And that’s led to some surprises. For one, a lot of the bugs living in our gut are totally distinct from anything we’ve encountered before.

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Big Data and Genetic Sequencing Will Help Extend the Human Lifespan

Gooooood, good.

Big data will help crack the code on aging.

Two of the leading scientists at the edge of the medical revolution believe that our life expectancy could start creeping up toward the triple digits.

David Agus, a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California, said at the Fortune Global Forum on Monday that he believes that with our current technology humans have the potential to regularly live into their ninth or tenth decade.

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